discernment and delight

the illusion of finality: Psalm 43

The potency of despair lies in part in the pretense of permanence. When caught in the deathly grip of sadness, we believe this is all we shall ever know. The promise of dawn seems unthinkable.

Why are you cast down, O my soul,
and why are you disquieted within me?
Hope in God; for I shall again praise him,
my help and my God.

There is a reality more concrete than despair, more trustworthy and closer to the core of what is true. Despair clouds our view of it, indeed makes it seem a mirage, a mockery, a tormenting seduction not worth the time it would require to take its measure.

The psalmist struggles toward the literary and existential distance from his own emotion that allows him to address his soul as though it were another. He queries it, which is what one ought to do in the unsustainable moment of distance and conversation with a personified being who is really oneself.

Why are you downcast? Why are you disquieted with in me?

We lose the thread if we imagine in our naiveté that the poet’s question is retrospective. He has already given us plenty of explanation for the occasion of his malaise. His self-interrogation points rather in a prospective direction. He knows better than his personified soul that its depressed state is not its destiny. Emboldened by the memory of One who is external to the vortex of sadness, he reminds himself to hope in that God.

Then these soul-rescuing syllables: I shall again praise him.

Despair is not destiny. It may be an attack, a faltering, even a besetting sin. But, like most of our other would-be destroyers, it is a paper tiger. It loses its footing to a critical but almost imperceptible degree when we say aloud in its presence that we shall not always be bound by its malice as we are right now, right here.